A Bible for the plowboy.

Tyndale at the New York Public Library

At last count, the Bible has been published in more than 1,700 English vernaculars. It is difficult, amid the proliferation, to comprehend a time when translating the Scriptures into English could be fatal. Such was the case for William Tyndale (ca. 1494-1536), English reformer, Catholic priest, and scholar. Professing the desire to "cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures" than the poorly educated clergy, he defied the church and put the Bible into everyday English. His achievement was twofold: He translated from the original Greek, bypassing the church-sanctioned Latin Vulgate. And he printed his Bibles pocket-sized so that they would be less expensive and more widely available. Arrested and imprisoned outside of Brussels in 1535, he was executed as a heretic in 1536.

Tyndale is the subject of a very good exhibition on view at the main branch of the New York Public Library through May 17. "Let There Be Light" sets forth the context for Tyndale's life and work with a splendiferous array of books and artifacts, some 100 in all, drawn from the holdings of the British Library (where the exhibition originated) and the New York Public Library.

Upon entering Gottesman Hall, the viewer sees the exhibition's crown jewels, a pair of Tyndale's New Testaments. One was bought by the British Library for more than [pounds]1 million in 1994, the other was discovered just months ago, undisturbed in its original binding, in the Stuttgart State Library. They are the only complete copies of the 1526 printing that survive, and they are magical. One can picture Tyndale's plough-boy opening for the first time to the Gospel of Mark: "This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God, as it is written in the prophets...." It is as if a light goes on. Nestled between these two volumes is the only surviving document in Tyndale's hand, a letter written from his Belgian prison pleading for some basic comforts as winter approached, and for his Hebrew Bible and grammar.

The exhibition concerns both the politics of translation and, fittingly for the library, the power of words. The texts on view span centuries, stretching from a medieval illustrated manuscript of the Vulgate, Saint Jerome's fourth-century Latin translation, to the Black Bible Chronicles (1993), in which Pharaoh says to Moses and Aaron, "Look, boys, why are you here? Prove to me that your Almighty is so fired up hot." There is a fascinating panel that compares translations of various biblical passages. Its effect is to underscore the lasting nature of Tyndale's achievement. After all, how can one improve upon "In the beginning, God created..."?

In Tyndale's time, access to the Bible was severely limited. Because the church approved only the Latin Vulgate for use, and because only the educated could read Latin, the everyday person's contact with Scripture was minimal. For decades leading up to the Reformation, as the exhibition shows, biblical translation and calls for church reform were natural partners: Church practice and doctrine, supported by specific renderings in the Vulgate, were unassailable so long as the Bible remained inaccessible. The Bible became the great divider between the "establishment" church, which feared alternative interpretations of its founding document, and the reformers, who urged greater access to the Scriptures.

Thus the Bibles themselves tell the story best, and there are plenty of them on hand. Here, for example, are four Lollard Bibles, translated into English from the Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his followers in the 1380s, and condemned as heretical, in part because of their association with Wycliffe's radical, anti-clerical Lollard movement. (These led to the 1408 Constitutions of Oxford, which forbade "unauthorized" translation of the Scriptures into English and threatened excommunication for anyone who read an English Bible.)

In the rest of Europe, though vernacular translations were not officially approved, they were in practice unopposed. Among the European vernacular Bibles in the exhibition are the Ferrara Bible (1553), a printed Spanish edition of the Old Testament for use by Jews exiled from the Iberian Peninsula by the Inquisition, and a 1541 Swedish Bible with a full-page illustration in Exodus of a Scandinavian Aaron resembling a refugee from the Ring Cycle, horned helmet and all.

As the "new learning" of the Renaissance spread across Europe, translators and reformers gathered strength, and the fruits of their work, so important to Tyndale, are on view in the exhibition. In 1516, Erasmus printed his Novum instrumentum, the New Testament in its original Greek with a new Latin version, in which he essentially corrected the Vulgate and declared in the preface that the Bible should be translated into the languages of lay people. There is Martin Luther's 1522 German translation of the Greek New Testament that could be understood in every region of Germany. And there is the marvelous Complutensian Polyglot, published in Spain in 1522. An imposing tome, it sets on a single page the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew), the Vulgate, a new Latin translation, and, at the bottom, Aramaic commentaries on the Hebrew. Its blocks of text, orderly and varied, spread across the page like quilting squares.

Tyndale, an Oxford-educated scholar and priest, was familiar with most if not all of these works, and they influenced him profoundly. He began reading the New Testament in Greek and found considerable divergence between what he read there and the theology and practice of the church. He came to believe passionately that the Bible belonged in the hands of the people. When in 1524 Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London, declined to grant him the necessary permission to translate, Tyndale fled to Germany and into the doctrinal arms of Martin Luther. There, supported by an English merchant named Humphrey Monmouth, he began printing a New Testament that he was forced to abandon after only ten pages. Known as the "Cologne Fragment," the surviving eight sheets are at the exhibition, providing the viewer a sense of the fragility of Tyndale's mission and the remarkable tenacity he brought to it. Fleeing to Worms in 1526, Tyndale printed 3,000 copies of a complete New Testament, smuggling them into England in bales of cloth.

The reaction of the English bishops was swift and savage. Bishop Tunstall gave Sir Thomas More permission to read Tyndale's works so that More could refute them in English. Thus began More s series of intemperate attacks on Tyndale, recounted here with the texts of More's Dialogue (1529), Tyndale's An Answer (1531), and More's Confutation (1532). The bishops used stronger tactics. Tunstall had preached at a ceremony in Saint Paul's in November 1526 at which copies of Tyndale's Bible were burned. The archbishop of Canterbury dunned local priests and bishops for money to buy the Bibles for burning, and the exhibition includes a letter from Bishop Nix, who sent the archbishop ten marks and congratulations for his "gracious and blessed deed." Under Tunstall's successor, John Stokesley, the government was sanctioned to burn heretics alive, both men and women.

Tyndale was shocked by the sacrilege and savagery, and he began to write prologues, polemics, and marginal notes to his translations that were more sharply critical of the church. The most important of these, also on display in the exhibition, is The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), Tyndale's response to More's charges that the reformers were seditious and treasonous.

During this time Tyndale had also begun to study Hebrew, which he found even more amenable to English than Greek. On view in the library's exhibition are his translations of the Pentateuch (1530) and the Book of Jonah (1531), which, with its prophetic call to preach the word of God, was an important text for reformers. Tyndale's greatest achievement, his revised New Testament, appeared in 1534, and the exhibition boasts Anne Boleyn's personal copy.

Centuries away from the politics of Tyndale's case, we may judge his work on its merits. He combined excellent scholarship in Greek and Hebrew with an ear for rhythm and cadence, creating a simple, direct style that mirrored the koinou Greek of the New Testament.

Tyndale's legacy to Christians and to speakers of English goes far beyond the well-known quotations that are splashed on the exhibition panels like sound bites: "Am I my brother's keeper?" "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "fight the good fight." He demonstrated conclusively that English could be flexible, beautiful, and direct, a suitable vehicle for the word of God. In 1611, those who produced the Authorized Version of the Bible (the King James), drew heavily on Tyndale and often printed his translations unaltered.

Tyndale's determination to make the Bible available collided with the insistence by the "powers that be" (a Tyndale phrase) on controlling interpretation and access. This tension between tradition and change, ecclesiastical authority (with the unity it insures) and private conviction still mark the life of the church. As the beautiful and evocative texts of the library's exhibition attest, Tyndale still challenges us to wrestle with the sometimes contradictory prerogatives of obedience and conscience. But above all, Tyndale's work is a call to learn and cultivate the word of God in our everyday lives.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is the co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive (Bantam, 1988).